Nintendo President Admits Regrets Over Wii

Future Nintendo hardware will be marketed differently.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata recently took some time during an investor’s conference to detail some of the regrets he has over the marketing of the Nintendo Wii, reports Reuters.

Iwata places the blame solely on his company’s shoulders, wishing they hadn’t relied so heavily on themselves when handling the marketing of the Wii.

“I now regret that we didn’t tie up with someone outside the company to market the Wii. If we had done that, the fate of the Wii might have been different.

“Now I am aware that we should not rely too much on ourselves. You will see what I mean by this when we market the 3DS and the Wii in the future.”

What’s interesting is that Iwata is saying these things right as Nintendo formally admitted to the Wii successor’s existence (seriously, it was during the same conference call that the Wii 2 was formally announced). But even if the Nintendo Wii has seen its second straight year of declining sales, overall, the system was a huge financial success for the house that Mario built.

The problem of declining sales for the Wii is two-fold. Firstly, everyone that is mildly interested in what the Wii has to offer already has one — or has a family member who has one. Secondly, the Nintendo Wii is just not a future-proof console. Where Microsoft and Sony have integrated social media and online functionality into the very roots of their consoles, Nintendo has remained stubborn to change. The Wii successor is, in theory, a chance for Nintendo to rectify this “misstep.”

But again, even if the Wii targeted the “casual” gaming market and not the “hardcore,” there’s no denying that the system practically printed money for Nintendo for quite some time. For a system that bucked the trends of the console industry, that’s pretty impressive. So, it’s going to be interesting when Nintendo conforms to everyone else with their next console.